WHAT IS AND EVER MUST BE

You can feel it coming,
can't you? Even in this
exhibit of former friends
where you wander past walls
of drawings, prints and paintings,
emerald bee-eaters,
fat rust-colored roosters,
naked women leaning
against abstract barns,
a series of houses,
still lives of blood ripe
peaches, exquisite, fruit
prints of a snowy river
while outside the dark
windows the river empties
into the starless night,
it's all line and value,
color and texture,
gravity and grace. You
buy three drawings of
sandhill cranes taking flight,
captured, as it were, as they
escape a slip of marsh ice
and leave the photographs
of powerlines stretched
across a field of rotted
pumpkins, straggled vines,
plein air paintings of the
old County Grounds, those
fields of lavender and
marigold, milkweed and wild
raspberry, hawks and kestrels
thistle and milkweed husks,
the hollow graves where the
nameless and star-crossed
orphans were buried, you
can feel it coming, can't
you, now that they've swept
the leaves in great mounds
so the streets look like
ancient burial mounds,
these nights are all so
elegiac, when the freight trains
rattle and moan, you feel 
a cold front coming in from 
the west, and you know it's coming,
there's nothing you can do,
it's the tide of all things
material and the
inconsequential.